Master of Orion 3

Management simulations are, to put it mildly, a very unusual corner
of the gaming universe. From Championship Manager and Sim City to
the likes of Master of Orion or Galactic Civilisations, they all
share common traits - like a heavy reliance on statistics, an
extremely in-depth gameplay model, and the derision of those who
don't "get" the genre as being nothing more than a glorified
spreadsheet.

Master of Orion is one of the original flag bearers for this genre,
an epic management title which puts you in charge of an advanced
race on the galactic stage and lets you handle everything from
exploration and colonisation through to the economy and, of course,
the military. This latest iteration of the series has been a very,
very long time coming, having slipped for well over a year before
finally arriving on shelves - but fans of the series may find
themselves asking whether it was worth the wait.

Rule with an iron spreadsheet

Two things are
immediately apparent when you first start playing MOO3 -
firstly, that it's incredibly detailed, and secondly, that
it's incredibly ugly. The game boasts screen after screen of
in-depth information about the state of your empire, with
literally hundreds of statistics ranging from economic and
demographic information to the state of your research efforts,
geological surveys of planets and your relationships with
other races in the game. It's an impressive and indeed
overwhelming amount of information to digest.

Unfortunately, it's not exactly presented in a particularly
attractive manner. While the information screens themselves are
fairly functional, any parts of the game that try to represent
anything graphically are downright hideous. The back of the box
claims that the space battles in the game are a thing of beauty;
well, eye of the beholder or not, we're pretty sure that nobody is
going to consider the pixellated mess of voxels and crappy ship
designs "beautiful" in any way. The same goes for the main game
map, which illustrates the extent of your empire and the
surrounding star systems in low-resolution, messy 3D. To top it all
off, the game is stuck in 800x600 - a travesty in a modern title
that tries to pack so much information on screen, and anyone with a
monitor 19" or larger will certainly object to the fact that the
individual on-screen pixels are larger than the human head.

Alphabet Soup and Backbench Rebellions

Graphics, of course, aren't
the really important thing about a game like Master of Orion
3, so with that criticism out of the way, what about the game
itself? As previously mentioned, there's a vast amount of
information on offer - so much so that at first it seems
impossible to absorb or act upon that amount of detail. You
quickly realise, however, that the game doesn't actually
expect you to keep track of all that information - quite the
opposite, in fact.

Master of Orion 3, you see, has introduced a number of fascinating
new concepts in management sim design, the main one being that you
don't actually have to play the game at all. Each aspect of your
empire has an appointed viceroy who is perfectly capable of running
affairs without your intervention - and while that would be a great
idea if it just meant that you could delegate dull micro-management
to these chaps, it's a bit more of a problem when they continually
contradict or countermand your orders and intentions.

In fact, as soon as your empire grows to any decent size, you'll
find that conflict with other races isn't the biggest problem you
face - it's constant, frustrating conflict with your own viceroys
that will take up most of your time, and each turn of the game can
descend into a tedious matter of going around each planet and
resetting the build queues or fleet orders which your viceroys have
changed without your consent.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

If only
your enemies displayed the same kind of intelligence, the game
might be a lot more interesting - but in fact, the enemy AI in
MOO3 is terrible, far worse than in the previous game in the
series. Even on the hardest difficulty level, enemies seem
incapable of mounting any kind of sensible offensive against
you, resorting instead to sending tiny fleets crashing against
your defences and making some of the most appalling and
wasteful strategic decisions we've ever seen an enemy AI in a
videogame make.

We really can't fathom why Master of Orion 3 took so long to finish
- there's an incredible amount of detail in there, but behind the
vast lists of figures and statistics, the game itself is actually
very simple and quite painfully flawed. The effort that went into
the creation of such a detailed empire model, and even into writing
the hugely complex back story for the game, is to be applauded; but
in the light of the piss-poor gameplay, it's hard not to wish that
Quicksilver had spent a little more time on the game and a little
less time on the window dressing.

It's a terrible shame to see the Master of Orion series take such a
huge step backwards in terms of playability. We can only hope that
those longing for a decent space empire simulation won't be
disappointed by the other big hope for the genre, namely Stardock's
Galactic Civilisations, which looks very promising indeed and could
make up for the disappointment that is Master of Orion 3.